If you’re asking this question, that self-awareness is already a meaningful signal. People with severely impaired empathy rarely wonder about it. Still, empathy exists on a spectrum, and you can genuinely struggle with parts of it without being at either extreme. Understanding what empathy actually involves, and where the common breakdowns happen, can help you figure out whether what you’re experiencing is a real deficit or something else entirely.
Empathy Has Two Distinct Parts
Empathy isn’t a single skill. It has two components that operate through separate brain networks, and you can be strong in one while struggling with the other.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what someone else is thinking or feeling. It’s perspective-taking: you can look at a situation and correctly identify that your friend is hurt, your coworker is frustrated, or your partner feels dismissed. This runs through brain regions involved in social reasoning and mental modeling of other people’s internal states.
Affective empathy is the emotional echo. It’s what makes you actually feel something when you see someone else in pain or joy. This is processed through a different network centered on the anterior insula, a deeply connected brain region that integrates emotional, sensory, and cognitive information. Gray matter density in this area correlates directly with how much empathy a person experiences. When you wince watching someone stub their toe, that’s your anterior insula at work.
This distinction matters because the type of empathy you struggle with points to very different underlying causes. Someone who understands others’ emotions intellectually but doesn’t feel moved by them has a different profile than someone who gets overwhelmed by others’ feelings but can’t figure out what those feelings actually are.
Behavioral Signs of Low Empathy
Low empathy shows up in patterns, not isolated moments. Everyone has days when they’re too drained or distracted to tune into someone else’s emotions. That’s normal. A genuine empathy deficit looks more like a consistent tendency across relationships and situations. Common signs include:
- Defaulting to your own needs in conversations, even when a friend or family member is clearly struggling emotionally
- Being overly judgmental of others and underestimating what they’re going through
- Rarely expressing appreciation or gratitude in ways that feel genuine to the people around you
- Difficulty building emotional connections that go beyond surface-level interaction
- Struggling to understand people from different cultural, political, or religious backgrounds, not just disagreeing with them but finding their perspective incomprehensible
A useful self-check: think about the last few times someone close to you was upset. Did you notice? Did you feel anything in response? Did you try to understand their perspective, or did you jump to problem-solving, dismissing, or redirecting the conversation back to yourself? If those patterns feel familiar and consistent, that’s worth paying attention to.
How Low Empathy Shows Up in Relationships
Relationships are where empathy deficits become most visible, both to you and to the people around you. If your partner, friends, or family members have told you that you “don’t listen,” “don’t care,” or “don’t get it,” those complaints may be tracking a real pattern rather than just reflecting a bad argument.
In romantic relationships specifically, low empathy tends to create a recognizable cycle. Conflicts escalate quickly because one partner’s feelings aren’t being acknowledged. The other partner starts feeling like they can’t be open or vulnerable without being judged or dismissed, so they pull back emotionally. Over time, the empathic partner feels alone even inside the relationship, carrying the emotional labor of maintaining connection. Meanwhile, the lower-empathy partner may shut down conversations, get frustrated when emotions come up, or mentally categorize their partner as “always complaining” or “never satisfied,” which makes it even harder to listen carefully next time.
This pattern can also affect parenting. A parent with limited empathy may struggle to sit with a child’s emotions or talk through feelings, defaulting instead to logic, discipline, or dismissal.
It Might Not Be Low Empathy
Before concluding you lack empathy, consider a related but distinct possibility: alexithymia. This is a personality trait involving difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions. About 10% of the general population has some degree of it. The key difference is that people with alexithymia can often correctly name what someone else is feeling (their cognitive empathy is intact) but don’t experience the emotional response that typically comes with that recognition. Their emotional empathy is impaired, but the root cause is a broader difficulty with emotional processing, not a lack of concern for others.
Research using brain imaging and physiological measures found that people with alexithymia show lower emotional arousal (measured by skin conductance) when witnessing others’ distress, along with higher activation in prefrontal brain regions. Their brains appear to compensate through cognitive effort for what isn’t happening automatically at the emotional level. This compensation works for simple emotional tasks like labeling someone’s feelings, but breaks down for more complex emotional empathy like genuinely feeling concern for another person.
If you care about people in theory but feel emotionally flat or disconnected in practice, and especially if you also have trouble identifying your own emotions, alexithymia is a more likely explanation than a fundamental lack of empathy.
Different Conditions Affect Empathy Differently
Empathy impairment is a feature of several psychological conditions, but the profile varies dramatically depending on which type of empathy is affected.
Autism involves difficulty with cognitive empathy, the perspective-taking side. Autistic adults often struggle to read social cues or infer what someone else is thinking. But their affective empathy is typically intact or even heightened. They may feel others’ emotions intensely once they understand what’s happening. This is the opposite of psychopathy, where cognitive empathy is preserved (people with psychopathic traits can read others very well) but affective empathy is diminished. They understand your feelings; they just aren’t moved by them.
Narcissistic personality disorder involves a more complex picture. The diagnostic criteria describe someone with an impaired ability to recognize others’ feelings and needs, but who is excessively tuned into other people’s reactions when those reactions are relevant to themselves. It’s not a total absence of empathy so much as empathy that’s selectively filtered through self-interest.
Borderline personality disorder presents yet another pattern: a compromised ability to recognize others’ feelings combined with interpersonal hypersensitivity. People with this condition tend to perceive slights and insults where none were intended, and their perception of others skews toward negative attributes. They may feel too much in response to social interactions, but what they feel is often distorted.
How to Measure Your Empathy
The most widely used self-assessment tool is the Empathy Quotient (EQ), developed by researchers at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge. It’s a 60-item questionnaire scored on a scale of 0 to 80. In healthy adults, average scores run about 42 for men and 47 for women. There’s no hard cutoff for “low empathy,” but the test was designed to be sensitive to clinically significant empathy deficits, and scoring well below those averages is a reasonable prompt to explore further.
The EQ is freely available online, but keep in mind that any self-report measure has a built-in limitation: it requires you to accurately assess your own behavior. If you’re uncertain about your empathy, you may also be uncertain about how to rate yourself on questions about empathy. Asking someone who knows you well to describe how you respond to their emotions can provide a useful external check.
Empathy Can Be Developed
Empathy is not purely fixed. Your brain can learn to strengthen empathic responses through a process that works like other forms of emotional learning. Researchers at USC designed experiments where participants watched a character experience everyday highs and lows. Participants who repeatedly experienced a small personal reward when the character was happy began to develop stronger empathic feelings toward that character over time, even after the rewards stopped.
More tellingly, this learned empathy changed behavior, not just feelings. When given the choice to select a gift the character would enjoy, even at a personal cost, participants who had built that emotional association were more likely to prioritize the character’s preference. The emotional learning shaped both how they felt and how they acted. The researchers compared the mechanism to basic conditioning: just as the brain learns to associate a signal with food, it can learn to associate another person’s happiness with reward.
In practical terms, this suggests that actively practicing perspective-taking, spending time with people whose emotions you’re trying to understand, and deliberately attending to others’ experiences can gradually shift your empathic responses. It won’t happen overnight, and it requires genuine effort rather than going through the motions. But the brain’s capacity to build new emotional associations means that low empathy in your thirties doesn’t have to mean low empathy for life.